Let me be up front: I like Hillary Clinton. She’s smart, she’s tough, she’s ambitious — all important attributes of success in public life. As secretary of state, Clinton has advanced policies that I consider wise (the “reset” with Russia) and unwarranted (the intervention in Libya). But she has always done so with energy and skill.

This is an important point. One standard of success for any secretary of state is surely her or his effectiveness in promoting an administration’s foreign policy agenda. By that standard, Clinton’s performance in office has been exemplary, whatever my disagreement with that agenda.

She has also been loyal — another important quality in a secretary of state. Early concerns that Clinton would use her position to upstage her former rival, President Obama, proved groundless. In the event, she turned out to be a “team player”; there were relatively few leaks, for instance, related to differences between her views and others in the Obama administration. Clinton may not have enjoyed the extremely close relationship with the president of some of her predecessors (notably Henry Kissinger/Richard Nixon and James A. Baker, III/George H.W. Bush) but, by most accounts, she got along well with President Obama and worked smoothly with the White House.

How will last September’s deadly attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi affect Clinton’s legacy? It will surely not burnish her reputation: our approach to security was slipshod prior to the attacks and the Obama administration’s initial response was confused. But Clinton does not appear guilty of gross personal negligence. And talk of conspiracies and cover-ups is simply that: talk. Part of that talk is routine partisan bluster; part reflects a common unwillingness to acknowledge the role of sheer human error in disasters. (“Trutherism” — the belief that the attacks of September 11, 2001, involved the active complicity of the U.S. government, either in the attacks themselves or in a subsequent cover-up — is an extreme and pernicious example of this tendency.)

I doubt that Clinton will be viewed as one of the great post-World War II secretaries of state. This, let me stress, has less to do with her abilities and more to do with the historical circumstances of her time in office. The United States has faced neither the threats (Soviet aggression in the late 1940s) nor opportunities (Beijing’s split with Moscow in the 1960s) that permitted secretaries of state like Acheson and Kissinger to embark on historic shifts in U.S. foreign policy.

Will Clinton run for president in 2016? If her health holds up, my guess is yes. A major reason: like all major public figures of a certain age (Clinton is 65), she faces a simple but difficult question: what am I going to do for the rest of my life? Running for President — given Clinton’s experience and ambition — would appear to be one obvious answer.

Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.